Rutgers-New Brunswick is participating in the SERU (Student Experience in the Research University) project, which is a collaborative effort among various (mostly public) AAU institutions. The essential purpose of the SERU project is: to develop “new data sources and policy relevant analysis to help broaden our understanding of the undergraduate experience and to promote a culture of institutional self-improvement” at large, public research universities. A major advancement of SERU is the richness of its data for comparison with other research institutions at the academic program level.

Since the 2008-09 academic year, Rutgers-New Brunswick has surveyed its undergraduate students during the spring semester using the SERU survey instrument. Rutgers-Newark and Rutgers-Camden started participating in SERU since the 2013-2014 academic year. The next survey administration will occur in the spring 2017 academic semester. Berkeley and other University of California schools have administered a version of this survey for a number of years (called the University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey – UCUES) and invited other public AAU institutions to join in this survey research effort, which was renamed SERU in 2008. In addition to UC-Berkeley and the other UC campuses, other insitutions participating in the SERU project include Universities of Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Pittsburgh, North Carolina, Southern California, Texas, and Virginia, plus Texas A&M and Purdue Universities.

The SERU survey is a census and is administered to all undergraduates. The response rate for Rutgers-New Brunswick is typically in the 20-25 percent range, which is about average for all AAU institutions.

The SERU survey is designed to gather information from undergraduates about their academic and personal development, academic engagement, campus climate, time usage, and overall satisfaction and evaluation of the educational experience. In addition, demographic information not available in the Rutgers’ Student Record Data Base is collected.